Discovering Columbus

Ridley Scott, Cohiba in hand, directs Gérard Depardieu in 1492.

By the morning of December 2, 1991, Ridley Scott
was ready to start shooting his new movie. He was up long before dawn,
racing through final details. By first light, his big Mercedes was
winding its way through the narrow streets of Cáceres, past the
deserted esplanade, past the adobe huts on the edge of town, and
finally out onto the cold Spanish plain leading to a 16th-century
villa made to look like the ancient monastery of Santa Maria de la
Rabida.

By temperament, Scott is calm, methodical and cool to the point of
aloof, perhaps a vestige of his upbringing in the far north of
England. No one ever accuses Ridley Scott of wearing his emotions on
his sleeve. But one look at him this morning, fueled with coffee and
cigarettes pacing around inside La Rabida monastery, inspecting the
set, checking his cameras and lighting, commanding his crew, the
celebrated director of Alien, Blade Runner and Thelma &
Louise was a jangle of nerves, tightly clamped.

Etched into his face was fatigue. Dark circles ringed and puffed his
eyes--so blue, so masked--and a couple of days' worth of red and gray
stubble slid down his chin. Who had time to shave? Not Scott. For long
months, he had been putting in marathon days and frustrating weeks,
working against a terrible deadline, trying to manage a team of some
400 people, working in three different countries, on two different
continents, all in an effort to plan and shoot an adventure of epic
scope and grandeur, a movie that would recreate the historic voyages
of Christopher Columbus.

Once inside La Rabida, Scott moved quickly and precisely. Sharpening
camera angles. Fiddling with lighting. Positioning his monks at their
drafting tables, plumes in hand and eyes fixed to their maps of the
world, elegantly charted out on parchment and anchored in the firm
conviction that the Earth was flat. In his mind, in his sketchbook,
and here on the set, Scott had already worked this crucial first scene
down to its finest detail, from its color and composition to its most
subtle plays of light and shadow. He composed the scene the way a
classical painter would compose a mammoth canvas, one he dreamed could
be a masterpiece.

Throughout Scott's career, visuals have been his greatest strength;
Pauline Kael has called him a "visual hypnotist." To anyone who saw
Thelma & Louise, with its majestic landscapes of the
American West, it may come as little surprise that Scott trained as a
painter and graphics designer at the Royal College of Art in London,
often in drawing classes next to David Hockney. But this morning Scott
seemed intent on finding an even richer visual vocabulary: The candles
flickering above the drafting tables and the embers glowing in the
fireplace bathed his scene in glimmering hues of yellow and orange,
just as in the warm, intimate paintings of Caravaggio and Georges de
la Tour.

Finally, every detail in place, the mood as he wanted it, Scott
signaled he was ready to shoot. "Silencio por favor! OK, boys, quiet
down now," bellowed Terry Needham, one of Scott's assistant
directors. "Shhh, shhh, shhh...OK, now, a little more atmosphere!
Bring up the smoke..."

At once a hush fell over the converted stable and the 150 members of
the cast and crew jammed inside. And then every eye on the set turned
to the far end of the monastery and focused in on a huge wooden door
reaching upward like the apse of a cathedral. "Rolling .... Action!"
Slowly, creaking on its ancient hinges, the door inched open, and into
the light came Christopher Columbus. A collective gasp rippled through
the cast and crew. Columbus was cloaked in a long medieval robe the
color of burnt orange with black trim, his dark blond hair flowed down
over his collar, his blue-gray eyes burned with the haunted look of a
man launched on a holy mission, beyond the reach of Prudence or
Reason.

The impact on the set was stunning: This WAS Christopher Columbus,
sprung to life. Before everyone's eyes, this towering, mysterious
historical figure, so shrouded in myth, controversy and revisionist
politics, was again a real man, flesh and blood, soul and will. And
perfectly embodied by France's unique gift to the world of cinema,
Gérard Depardieu.

At this stage in his life, and in the script, Columbus was an
accomplished navigator and explorer, with long experience in the
Mediterranean Sea and along the Atlantic coast of Spain, France and
England. But he had been waiting an agonizing seven years for royal
permission to mount his dream voyage into the pure unknown, to test
his absolute conviction that the riches of the East could be reached
by sailing to the West. In the halls of power in Spain, Columbus and
his theory were objects of scorn and ridicule, and Columbus's patience
had worn dangerously thin. Striding into the monastery, his
frustration now wearing plain on his face, Columbus was greeted by his
friend and spiritual and political adviser, Antonio de Marchena, being
played by Spain's greatest actor, Fernando Rey.

"I have something for you," said Marchena, drawing from his robe a
parchment bearing a royal seal. "You are going to be heard at The
University of Salamanca."

Columbus studied the letter, marveling at the idea of at last
presenting his case to an official commission of the Spanish royal
court. He felt a rush of hope. And of panic: "God, that is in a week!
" During rehearsals earlier this morning, Depardieu's English had come
out haltingly and heavily Gallicized. But now, cameras rolling, his
English came out clear, fluid and slightly exotic, as befits a humble
mariner from Genoa who had settled in Spain.

"Cut! Good," said Scott. "Let's go again."

By the third try, Scott thought he had a printable take. He stared at
the replay in one of his video monitors. The composition and the
lighting looked right, and so did the chemistry between Columbus and
Marchena. And this time when Depardieu delivered his lines, with a
flurry of contradictory emotions playing across his face, Scott's hand
flew up to his heart in joy. And relief. After nearly a year of
agonized planning, scripting, casting, scouting locations, building
sets, outfitting ships and leading rehearsals, Scott seemed to sense
that this $45 million extravaganza just might deliver the magic for
which every director dreams and works.

Ever cool, ever cautious, through, Scott was not about to call for
Champagne. Still, after this successful take, on this crucial first
scene , those who know Scott well detected a sure sign of his rising
sprits. He put away his cigarettes and instead put a match to his
favorite cigar: a long, regal Cohiba, made from the finest Cuban
tobacco. A bold smoke to launch a very bold voyage.

***

On the set of every major movie, this first day of shooting is always
filled with tension and excitement, but 1492 carried with it
unusually high expectations and risks. For Scott's telling of the
story of Columbus and his voyage to America was not just a major film,
it was a colossal gamble--a $45 million gamble with implications far
more daunting than budgets and global grosses.

This was to be a Hollywood-scale extravaganza, but this time financed
and executed not by American studios and financiers but by Europeans,
with European cultural values and European ideas about what the art of
cinema should be. If 1492 succeeded, the film would be a
welcome triumph for Europe and European cinema, especially at a time
when more and more national film industries were feeling severely
menaced by America's increasing dominance of world cinema. But if it
failed, 1492 would be seen in Europe and in America as a major
defeat, more proof that the Europeans, with their boutique approach to
film-making, and their insistence on prizing art over commerce, just
cannot make smash blockbusters with industrial scale budgets and
international box-office muscle.

There were other layers of risk and ambition as well. In terms of its
pan-European financing and its production team, using technicians from
England, France and Spain, 1492 was designed to be a prototype
venture, one that could set the standard for a range of European
projects to come. Scott and Depardieu had shown they could bridge the
gap between European artistic values and Hollywood commercialism;
could 1492 help them lead Europe into a whole new era of major
filmmaking? That was the hope. But if the film failed, if, in the
typical Hollywood parlance, 1492 should "go down the toilet,"
well, then, Scott and Depardieu would surely face the heaviest flak.

But you would never know it watching Depardieu this morning. Between
takes at La Rabida, the huge, rollicking Frenchman joked with his
makeup team, pulled pranks on the sound specialists, friends of his
from France, and he did his general best to keep everyone loose and to
create a kind of family spirit and chemistry among the cast and
crew. Unlike so many actors, Depardieu seems to be totally lacking in
ego and pretense; he grew up in a peasant family in provincial France,
and despite all his success, he is not about to become a supercilious
Parisian. On the set, his warmth and clowning served as a sharp
contrast and complement to Ridley Scott's aloof precision and
preoccupation.

Like Depardieu, the origin of 1492 was purely French. In 1987,
a young French journalist named Roselyne Bosch went to Spain on what
was supposed to be a routine assignment for the French newsweekly
Le Point. Bosch was doing an article on how Spain was going to
fete the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage on behalf of Spain's
Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand and for her research, Bosch went to
Madrid and then further south to Seville to peek into the provincial
archives.

In the two cities, like countless historians before her, she found
some 40 million parchments, many never deciphered, and she found
scores of letters handwritten by Columbus. Leafing through some of
Columbus's books, she sometimes found notes and little drawings penned
in the margins. The more she looked through his books and papers, the
more real Columbus became to her; all the mythological haze
surrounding the man started to clear.

Bosch: "I was deeply moved just by seeing his handwriting and
signature. Suddenly, instead of being like Santa Claus, Columbus was a
human being .... Sometimes in the margin of a book, he would draw a
little hand pointing to a certain passage. It was very moving, and I
thought, 'This ought to be a movie."'

Indeed it seemed a natural, especially with all the hoopla planned for
the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage. And no one, up to then,
had ever brought Columbus convincingly to the screen. In 1949,
Hollywood brought out a Christopher Columbus, with Frederic
March in the title role, but the general assessment was that the movie
was an embarrassment and certainly not what Columbus deserved. In
fact, with all the renewed interest in him, it has now become clear
what a fascinating man Columbus was, no matter how disputed is the
legend that he discovered America.

While historians disagree about many aspects of his life and travels,
there now seems to be a consensus that while Columbus hoped to return
from The New World with gold, silk and spices, he returned with
something that proved to be as valuable: tobacco. Most accounts, from
historians from America to Cuba, now maintain that when Columbus
visited Indian villages in the Caribbean, he found the natives smoking
enormous leaves fashioned into tight rolls, an aboriginal
cigar. According to some Cuban accounts, two of Columbus's crew
members, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, were sent on a mission
into the interior of what Columbus thought was the Asian mainland but
was probably Cuba. There, in a peaceful village, they made what was
probably Europe's first sighting of tobacco.

By some historical accounts, Columbus himself was indifferent to the
appeal of tobacco, so preoccupied was he by his quest for the Grand
Khan and the source of Solomon's riches. But tobacco was among the
curiosities and riches Columbus's ships brought back from The New
World, thus introducing the pungent leaves to Europe and laying the
groundwork for the tobacco industry and popular subculture that would
develop over the next 500 years. In subsequent voyages, European
explorers and traders bartered their silks and cinnamon and other
spices for bales of tobacco, until the leaves themselves became a
focal point of the growing transatlantic commerce.

Bosch came to see Columbus as an ideal subject for a film, a movie
showing him not as a cartoon character but as a real man fueled by
intellectual fervor and messianic zeal. She called a friend of hers in
Paris, Alain Goldman, a French film distributor. He flew to Seville
for a firsthand appraisal of the Columbus material and a visit to the
cathedral in Seville, where Columbus is buried. (Though there are
historians who doubt the remains are actually his.) Excited by what
he saw, Goldman encouraged Bosch to pursue her research, and she
stayed on in Spain. Soon the two of them became partners in a
fledgling film venture: he as producer and Bosch plunging into
research and a conversion from journalism to screenwriting.

Initially, they envisioned doing the entire film as a French project,
but they found no support among French producers. It would be too big
a budget for France, the producers said, try Hollywood. Rank amateurs
though they were, neophytes with little idea how Hollywood worked and
French to boot, Bosch and Goldman nonetheless started knocking on the
doors of American studios. And they found no encouragement. And
understandably so: they had no director, no star and no track record
in screenwriting or movie production. You can almost hear Hollywood
executives chortling: "No star, no script; kids, kids, get real."

Bosch became very disconcerted, but then for Le Point she did a
profile of the American writer Tom Wolfe. He told her about how he had
come to write The Right Stuff, and of his admiration for the
NASA astronauts. Bosch was inspired: " 'Listen,' I told him, `the
astronauts are nothing next to Columbus.' It was talking with Wolfe
that I started to believe....And the more I read, the more I worked,
the more convinced I became that Columbus was somebody people think
they know, but really nobody knew. And so I felt I had to tell them."

Finally, Bosch knocked on the right door: Ridley Scott. He had ideal
credentials for directing Columbus: he was a European with artistic
merit, commercial success and excellent connections in Hollywood. He
was just coming off Thelma & Louise and it would soon bring
him an Oscar nomination as best director. By chance, Scott on his own
had been exploring the idea of doing a film on Columbus, and when
Bosch set forth her vision and a synopsis of a script, he had one
immediate reaction: "Yes, if Gérard Depardieu would agree to be
Columbus."

This took Bosch by complete surprise; oddly, Depardieu had not even
occurred to her. With their sights set on finding U.S. financing, she
and Goldman had been focusing on American stars like Kevin Costner and
Michael Douglas, big names they figured would be the only way they
could secure the necessary funding. But as soon as Scott said it,
Bosch knew Depardieu would be perfect. The star of Cyrano de
Bergerac, Danton, Jean de Florette and The Last Metro was
now the biggest star in Europe, and with Peter Weir's Green
Card, he had made an impressive debut in the English-language
market. Distributed by Disney, Green Card grossed over $40
million in America alone. Bosch was sure he would be perfect for
Columbus. "Right away I knew there would be no problem with energy;
Gérard would burst the screen," she said. "And from that moment
on, thinking of him in the role gave me a big push. Instead of having
an abstract idea of Columbus, I knew it was Gérard. It was a
liberation."

But would Depardieu agree? Bosch sent Depardieu a draft script and
then set up a meeting with him in Paris, at the Hotel Raphael, a
favorite rendezvous point for French film stars and executives. She
and Scott arrived in the bar at the appointed hour of 7 p.m., but
there was no sign of Depardieu. After a half-hour wait, Bosch
telephoned Depardieu at a pied-à-terre he keeps in Paris, and
he answered with a very soft, very shy voice. Had he forgotten? Or was
he just nervous about taking on such a colossal role? She had no clue,
but soon Depardieu was storming into the Raphael and into a torrential
stream of conversation. For an hour Depardieu did most of the talking,
about himself and his vision of Columbus; it left both Scott and Bosch
a little dazed.

Bosch: "To my astonishment, I realized that in one or two readings he
had understood all the subtleties behind the lines. When in Hollywood
I had tried to discuss Columbus's relationship with Queen Isabella, I
had great difficulty, because it was ambiguous, it was an unresolved
sexual attraction. In sum, it was not Hollywood. Gérard got it
right away, like a laser .... Ridley and I came away very
excited. Gérard is larger than life. And Ridley films larger
than life. It seemed a perfect match."

With Depardieu aboard, Goldman and Scott went to see Gaumont, the
French film conglomerate and part of the Schlumberger family
empire. They met with Nicolas Seydoux, head of Gaumont, and a close
friend of Depardieu. Scott was expecting a tough Hollywood-style
negotiation, but when they named a price of 43 million francs, some $8
million, one of the largest sums ever paid for French distribution
rights, Seydoux simply said fine. "We shook hands," Scott recalled,
"and then a moment later a waiter came out carrying a silver tray with
a bottle of Champagne, from the family winery of course."

With Gaumont providing the essential start-up capital, Scott and Bosch
began putting together the mammoth venture, from finding and
outfitting Columbus's ships to scouting the locations needed in Spain
and The New World. Goldman focused on packaging and selling world
rights to their project, but soon he ran into an unexpected and
terrifying hitch: Hollywood competitors.

Producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, best known for their
Superman movies, had their own Columbus film in the works, and
it promised to be a real Hollywood shebang. There was talk Tom Selleck
would play the lead, there were rumors Marlon Brando would have a
role, and the Salkinds were busy trying to legally corner every
conceivable title using the name Columbus. Both productions feared
that even in the year of the 500th anniversary of his sailing, the
world market just could not accommodate two Columbus extravaganzas.

Goldman, then not even 30 years old, was suddenly dipped into a
full-scale Hollywood battle, one that would fry his nerves for months
on end, right down to the first week of shooting, when he was still
waiting for bank guarantees and insurance clearance. The battle
quickly became nasty and was played out at several levels: with
distributors and theater chains, with lawyers arguing over the rights
to potential titles, and it was played out in the press, from
Variety to The New York Times. The Salkinds made lavish
use of Variety to announce they had signed Brando, for $5
million, to play Tomas de Torquemada, the infamous head of the Spanish
Inquisition. Selleck wound up as King Ferdinand, while for Columbus
the Salkinds signed George Coraface, a European whose name has yet to
become a household word or a box-office draw.

From the vantage point of the Europeans, the Salkind project was going
to be Hollywood as usual: a slick, highly commercial action picture,
Superman meets Columbus. A cliché bearing little resemblance to
the kind of historically accurate epic and human portrait Scott, Bosch
and Goldman wanted. So when The New York Times did a large
piece putting the two pictures on an equal footing, Scott went
ballistic. To his mind, it was as if The Times was dealing with
Superman and Caravaggio in the same breath. He raged about it for
weeks, and he even drafted angry letters to the editor venting his
spleen. Only the counsel of close friends, and Depardieu, kept him
from mailing them off.

In the battle between the two Columbus movies, as in the larger
rivalry between the American and European film industries, money is
one of the clearest lines of demarcation. For his role as the Spanish
inquisitor, involving ten days of shooting, Brando got $5 million. For
playing Columbus, dominating nearly every scene in an 82-day shoot,
Depardieu happily agreed to a package of $3 million, plus a hefty
share of the take in France and a smaller share of other markets.

Probably no other star in Europe could command anywhere near that
figure, and European producers show no inclination to get into
American-style bidding wars for big-name stars and directors. For the
Europeans, it is not just a question of money, it is a question of
values. Depardieu, for instance, will follow Columbus by making a
low-budget picture with France's Jean-Luc Godard, an artistic venture
for which he will be paid practically nothing. Few American actors
would do the same.

At this year's Cannes Film Festival, along with rival posters
announcing the two Columbus films, these two radically different
attitudes about money and the cinema were once again on vivid
display. One of Cannes's most acclaimed films was the Merchant-Ivory
production Howard's End, starring several of Britain's greatest
actors: Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson and more. The
film has been hailed a masterpiece by many critics, and it is doing
very well commercially around the world. European film wags in Cannes
were gleefully noting that the entire film was done for $8 million,
just over half the $15 million Michael Douglas received up front for
his lead role in Basic Instinct.

Still, all the wags in Cannes cannot change the cold logic of the
money men in Hollywood: to them, $15 million for Douglas, and the
record $3 million paid to Joe Eszterhas for his script, look like
great investments. The film is on course to gross some $200
million. By early summer it was even the leading box office hit in
France, home of the auteur and probably the most eclectic film
audience in the world.

Intellectuals in France cringed and with cause: They had to swallow
the opening of EuroDisney and Basic Instinct within just a few
weeks. But only two French films were drawing anywhere near comparable
numbers: Tous Les Matins du Monde, starring Depardieu and his
son Guillaume, and Indochine, featuring Catherine Deneuve's
best performance in years. Little wonder the French so often decry
"the tyranny of the marketplace."

Against this backdrop, and with all that was at stake, the first day's
tension on the set of 1492, inside Rabida was certainly
understandable. Besides, like the Salkinds, Scott was having his own
problems with casting. During the first two weeks of the shoot, he
still had no Queen Isabella. Scott had wanted Anjelica Huston, but
negotiations with her battery of agents turned into a nightmare, and
they turned to Sigourney Weaver, the star of Scott's first
Alien movie, who worked out fine. At one stage in the Huston
impasse, Scott just threw up his hands: "Screw 'em all. I'll take me
mum."

Scott's impatience only emphasized his frustration with the way movies
are made today. The way he and his producers managed 1492 made
clear that Scott has no fondness for Hollywood glitz and
self-indulgence. In a world where some American actors demand to
travel with their personal trainers, and where Kim Basinger demands
cases and cases of Evian with which to wash her hair, Scott and
Depardieu allowed themselves only a few indulgences: Scott his Cohibas
and Depardieu his phone.

Depardieu hates limousines, and while he prefers wines that are light,
fruity and modestly priced, Depardieu is not about to skimp on his
round-the-world phoning. Depardieu makes three, four, sometimes even
five films a year, meaning almost his entire life is spent on the
road. His telephone is his lifeline, to his wife and two children in
Paris, to his agents in Paris and Los Angeles, and to director, pals
like Peter Weir in Australia, with whom he made Green Card.

Indeed, telephoning became one of Depardieu's only reliefs from what
turned out to be a grueling five months of rehearsals and
shooting. Scott is what Depardieu calls "a work maniac, and throughout
the 82 days of shooting, the typical schedule began before 6 a.m. and
rarely ended before 8 or 9 p.m. In Cáceres, a night scene of a
spectacular public burning of heretics went on for some 17 hours,
until the extras, recruited locally, began an angry revolt. At one
stage, the production chiefs were considering shortening a Christmas
leave, an idea later abandoned, and only a "mais, non" from Depardieu
halted plans for one day of Sunday shooting. For the most part,
though, there was little complaining about the murderous
schedule. Everyone understood that Captain Scott, whom his English
crew calls "Guv'nor," was up against a terrible deadline. The film had
to be shot, edited, mixed and polished in time to get enough prints
for the world launch date: October 9, 1992, on Columbus Day
weekend. Scott did not intend to be late.

On the open sea in the tropics, the heat was murder. Upwards of 100
degrees. Aboard the Santa Maria, the cast and crew were stripped down
to their shorts, the extras were sprawled out on the deck, even the
usually indefatigable Ridley Scott looked as wilted and wrinkled as
his cotton shirt. And with good reason: today was the 82nd day of the
shoot, 82 days with Scott alone at the helm. But with any luck, this
would be the last day of the shoot, and Scott was on course to wrap up
his voyage not only on time and within budget, but almost a full day
early.

All morning Scott and his crew shot scenes on the bow of The Santa
Maria, nothing complex, mostly pans and close-ups of his principal
actors. And after each of the stars finished his work, the cast and
crew gave them an ovation. By now they were all part of the same
family. The shoot had moved to the coast of Costa Rica in January of
1992, to film the segments of Columbus leading the Nina, the Pinta and
the Santa Maria to the shores of The New World and establishing his
first base camps. In Costa Rica, not just the heat but the pace had
proved to be grueling.

Scott usually had his cast and crew on the boats by 6 a.m. and would
shoot until all the natural light was gone, stopping only for a break
for lunch and a communal swim. In America, where crews work under
tight union regulations, such a schedule would have been unthinkable,
not to mention what it would have cost in overtime. But with the
British film industry in shambles, the predominantly English crew was
happy to have the work, especially on a venture that held out so much
hope for European cinema.

Still, it had been 82 days of exhausting frenzy. Such was the rush
that Scott's aides were assembling rough cuts as the shooting in Costa
Rica progressed. And anyone visiting the set in Costa Rica quickly
understood that the $45-million European budget was not spent on star
salaries or limousines. Consider only Columbus's three majestic
caravels, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. Two of the ships
came from Bristol, England, where they had been refitted from the
hulls up and sailed across the Atlantic, with full crews. The third
ship Scott's team found in Brazil, and it had to be reworked and
sailed to the Pacific side of Costa Rica.

At one stage the Europeans considered bringing the boats home via New
York and its planned regatta of sailing ships, part of the Columbus
500th anniversary festivities. The ships' presence might have
generated good publicity for 1492, but in the end the price tag
of the detour was judged too steep: $1 million.

A much larger sum was spent building La Isabella, a replica of the
village Columbus established on the island of what was then known as
Hispaniola, now the home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Near the
Costa Rican coast, Scott's team built a lovely Spanish church, a villa
for Columbus and a series of out-buildings. Bosch's script shows
Columbus in all his faults as well as strengths, and the film shows
some of the violence he used to quell the local populations, violence
that on screen meant putting a torch to La Isabella, practically
before the whitewash was dry. They also built a long jetty out over
the sea, so that the Santa Maria could use it as a dock. At last
report, there were no plans to burn it down.

On this final afternoon aboard the Santa Maria, the cast and crew were
a swirl of conflicting emotions. Over the long months, they had formed
themselves into an itinerant family, far away from their real
families. And now, the work nearly completed, they would soon be going
their separate ways, back to England, France, Spain and America. One
of those who would be returning to America was Kevin Dunn, who was
portraying the captain of the Santa Maria, with Depardieu above him as
commanding admiral of the fleet.

During the shoot, Dunn and Depardieu had become pals, and Dunn brought
a purely American eye to the entire Columbus venture. A native of
Chicago, now working out of Los Angeles and finding his way into some
good secondary roles, Dunn found working with Depardieu to be a dream
come true. "Years ago, I vowed to work with him," Dunn said, "because,
watching his movies, I couldn't keep my eyes off him. There was so
much going on."

What impressed Dunn during the shoot was Depardieu's lack of pretense
and his naturalism on camera; the Frenchman works like no American
actors. "One day here in Costa Rica," Dunn said, "we were all going up
a path through the jungle. Most of us tried to make it look easy, out
of the ego of not wanting to look clumsy. Not Gérard. He just
let whatever was going to happen happen, and when at one moment he
staggered and nearly fell, I'm sure he looked great on camera and
wholly believable."

On another scene in the jungle, trudging through a river, many of the
actors were anxious about snakes, Dunn recalled. "So there we were, up
over our waists in the water, and the director yells, 'Action.' And
suddenly, we would feel this terrifying jab right on the thigh, just
like a snake. It was Gérard poking you under water with a metal
pike and shouting, 'Let's go!' I've never seen anything like his
method of acting. It's just so different. I think he doesn't want to
know what is going to happen emotionally. And I don't know of any
other actor in the world who could have pulled this film off."

That seemed to be the general sentiment aboard the Santa Maria on the
final afternoon of the shoot. And there was also a general glee
emanating from rumors about the Salkind film. A few weeks later,
Marlon Brando publicly attacked the Salkinds and denounced the movie,
claiming that despite their promises to the contrary, the Salkinds
were portraying Columbus as though he were a cartoon hero, instead of
the murderous villain and plunderer Brando feels he was. Brando's
attack was big news, but none of the reports indicated if he planned
to give back his $5 million fee.

On this final afternoon, Roselyne Bosch and Alain Goldman were on hand
to bear witness to the end of this stage in the birth of their baby,
and they were both in awe of Depardieu. To Bosch's surprise, Depardieu
had never suggested changes in her script or interfered in any way
with Ridley Scott. "They lead, I follow," was how Depardieu described
it, except for one scene in Costa Rica, which to the actor just did
not feel right. He explained why, Bosch said, and everyone instantly
knew he was right. "It was just as Ridley often told me," Bosch said,
"for this film, Gérard was a benediction."

At 5:25 p.m. in the afternoon, the heat of the day finally subsiding,
and the bow of the Santa Maria framed by the orange sun lowering on
the horizon, Columbus stood with his face to the wind, the explorer
now an old man completing his fifth voyage across the Atlantic. Ridley
Scott, Adrian Biddle, his cinematographer, and the rest of the camera
crew zoomed-in for close-ups. This was to be their last shot of
Columbus, and an air of quiet settled over the ship, as the cast, crew
and extras looked on in silence.

Their long, punishing voyage was drawing to a close, their
multilingual, multicultural family was about to split up, and it was a
solemn, moving moment. Until Depardieu pinched a cameraman on the arm
and let out an hysterical cackle. Ridley Scott allowed himself a grin,
and it quickly broadened into a smile, and then all his British
reserve seemed to melt away in the emotion of the moment. Ahead of him
were long months of editing and post-production, but Scott was
bringing his boats and his crew back on schedule, with nary a mishap,
and with old Columbus alone in the bow, just as Scott had sketched him
many months before.

The last close-up done, Depardieu pulled off his gray wig and stood to
a huge ovation from the cast and crew. An hour later, as the Santa
Maria drew up next to the jetty, Champagne and a similar ovation
greeted Ridley Scott, the Guv'nor, the respected captain of this
exotic adventure. He was feted and toasted and hugged and kissed and
endlessly congratulated, a might tough for anyone used to maintaining
a stiff upper lip.

But it was a moment Scott might well cherish for a long time to come,
especially on those rare moments between films when he can relax, put
his feet up and enjoy a Cohiba. And if the heathen critics should fail
to appreciate his painterly vision, well, he can always use his Cohiba
to torch their bloody reviews.